At the time of writing this I, like many other UCT students, am doing my best to come to terms with the loss of the Ikeys in last Monday’s Varsity Cup Final. I would love to say that it is just a game of rugby, and that I don’t care about what happened, but sadly, I cannot. There are two reasons for this. Firstly, the game meant a lot to me, as it did to thousands of us, and I really, really wanted us to win. We had fought so hard and a loss was always going to be heartbreaking, especially when we came so close to taking the cup.

The second, and probably bigger, reason that our loss irks me so much is because of the way in which people seem to assign to the result of the game some measurement as to which university is better (and I use the word ‘university’ very lightly, in fact rather ironically, when referencing that torpid hell-hole of ‘academic’ squalor).

I generally seek to avoid mentioning such repulsive places in my writing, but I can no longer do so. We need to have the Stellenbosch talk. I have to clear things up, and you need to know this: UCT has always been, is, and always will be, superior to Stellenbosch. In all endeavours, including rugby, UCT wins.

I do not need to describe Stellenbosch to any of you that have been there. If you were there last Monday you would have experienced the hate, the bigotry and the absolute bloody barbarism of it’s inmates. You were probably pelted with cans as you walked out of the stadium and, if you walked in alone (as I once did), you would probably have been pushed into the fence or thrown to the ground by hordes of drunk, red-faced shouting dogs. If you were with a girl, a big gang of them might have come up to you and sworn at her, hoping you would retaliate so that they might beat you to a pulp.

Every time I’m in Stellenbosch I find myself waiting for somebody to run up to me and go, “It’s a joke! It’s a joke! This isn’t real!” When I hear ‘Die Stem’ blaring through residence windows, and guys in cars are driving past and calling us ‘k-lovers’, I keep waiting for somebody to tap me on the shoulder and go, “We really had you going there! You didn’t actually think that this could really happen in South Africa in 2010, did you?” Yet nobody ever does.

So let’s look at some hard facts, some of which you already know:

1. In the international rankings, Stellenbosch ranks hundreds of positions below UCT. Where exactly it falls is hard to tell, because the rankings generally stop after 500.

2. Stellenbosch is easier to get accepted into. Anybody who has applied to UCT knows that, and  they also know how dubious and tired it becomes when some partially-retarded tool tells you, “I went to Stellies because it’s so much more fun than UCT.”

3. At Stellenbosch rugby is everything, however, at UCT our Sports Council is seemingly intent on crippling our rugby side. Our budget is no more than R350 000. Theirs is nearing R6 million. We are an academic institution playing against a sports academy. We are accountants and engineers playing against full-time rugby players with degrees in BA Finger-painting. So the fact that we so nearly beat them, and that we one day will beat them, is a disgrace and humiliation to the students of Stellenbosch. If you think about what we did with what we have, UCT wins.

When we lose it hurts, it chokes and for a while it sits on your shoulders, but that’s part of life. And part of being a UCT student is dealing with that pain, painting on some more blue, enduring their bigotry and beer cans, and continually supporting our boys, even during the wind-swept games without alcohol on the Green Mile. We do this because in our hearts we know that we are better. And if we can suffer, carry on and contest against rugby teams with far superior resources, can you imagine what will happen when we take that resolve and put it behind the best academic teachings on the continent? It’s actually unfair.

But perhaps we should let them take their victory in the final. Let them savour that fleeting happiness while it lasts. Let them keep their dumb, muck cheerleaders and their biased MC’s. Let them drink brandy and talk about how they beat the souties and the blacks. Because, deep down, beneath that bravado, beneath the red faces of the men, and the make-up caked veneers of the women (women, not ladies), as they choke on that stale, old air of the past, they know what the future holds. They know that soon enough they will be flung out of their all-white racist enclave into a country and world which has moved on without them and which has no place for them.

As the ill and old desperately cling on whilst feeling that cold dark death pulling them downwards, so too let these pitiful creatures frantically hold on to their dying way of life. For soon they will realise that their degrees don’t cut it overseas. Soon they will be serving the spoilt UCT first-years drinks. Soon they will be calling a black woman ‘boss’. And perhaps, in the midst of that great bleakness, it might make their pitiful existences a bit less depressing to think that they beat us in rugby a couple of times.

We are standing upon the mountain as the leaders and creators of the future South Africa, and world. We look down upon Stellenbosch as the drunken vagrants of tertiary education. We are harder to get in, we are stronger academically, we are more diverse, we are more peaceful, we are braver, we will be richer, and despite their desperate proclamations, our girls are much prettier.

UCT wins. UCT wins. UCT wins.